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ground news sounds good but they havent made any progress in about an year ive been using their app, its okay but sometimes it feeds facebook level of BS, ucranistan propaganda websites and so on
the military and space technology that USSR seemed to be successful in the beginning came a a result of "acquiring" the Nazi engineers that set the foundations in these fields, in particular for space. I can't suggest a good book about this as Russians keep their early history of rocket engineering still classified, however, I can recommend a channel of a Soviet rocket engineer who goes in depth about this topic on his channel, in Russian though.
The more video I watch on the soviet economy the more I realize that the main advantage the US economy had was their willingness to share game changing military technology with their civilian economy. Which created vast synergy and efficiencies and many positive feedback loop. Sharing really is caring and the US culture being able to share development with a wider swath of society really is the secret sauce that won them the cold war.
@Derek the idea of integrating the price signal as a "Sensory organ" of the command economy was on the table for the cyberneticists/economic planners, socialism with a market could still be socialism, its just that the soviets and US were at the extremes of that choice instead of a synthesis of those options.
@@MrWolfstar8 I fail to see how a price signal used by workers, in tandem with an autonomous resource distribution network maintained by workers, somehow cant be in line with socialism, economic controls operated by the workers. The soviet system, as you state with its beurocracies, is as far from worker control as the west was under capitalistic economies.
@@MrWolfstar8 all we needed was yet another definition of socialism. Thank you for that. Basing an argument on an unorthodox definition does not make for a good argument. For an example of socialism that does not fit your initial definition, we need only look at China, as you mentioned yourself.
Yep. Fact is, politicians and bureaucrats are really no better than investors and corporate management. They are just as greedy and corruptible. Giving them all the power in the state/society including the power to use coercion/violence (i.e. complete political, economic, and military power) is *bad idea.* Decentralized (free) market system where consumer directly vote with their wallet is far superior compared to a command economy.
@@MrWolfstar8 Rules around electronic cars are nothing close to the Soviet command economy unless you are being deliberately obtuse. Regulations are not a command economy, the US will not be dictating how or what cars will be made, and will not be assigning production numbers or materials to manufacturers. In fact, the reason it won't lead to a collapse is exactly because the government is relatively hands off, only stepping in to ensure the regulations are met.
I was once directly involved in the "OGAS" project close to the end of the entire USSR. The part I was involved in, was called "АСУ Народное Образование" or "OGAS Education". The key problem that was discovered in my time there can be summarized as "garbage in - garbage out" problem. It was very clear that all the people involved in the management were trying to cheat on providing the data entry to achieve some advantage for themselves. One example of that was the total area of the floors and walls specified in the measurements of schools were far too much. Managers wanted to get more supplies, so they were tweaking the data a bit to get by. The same was happening at all levels, I'm afraid.
@@phanx0m924 There was a shortage of supplies. The point was to get more supplies to exchange the surplus for other supplies that were in deficit. Embezzlement was one of the points, but it wasn't the main point. There were people who had genuine care for their schools. They were trying to work the system. The root of the problem was in the centralized planning that was incapable of balancing the requirements with the means of production, I reckon.
WE had GI-GA problem in the 80s, it was resolved when Xerox told us of how they had structured their own emails, chat and basic computer modes. ergo now in each PC and lappy made there is one folder named XEROX now you can seewhy.
Soviets had excellent popular science books on computer-related subjects even in 1950s. But even though those books described in often fairly accurate details how people would use Internet in the future (dial up, search engines, electronic books, machine translation, etc), in reality, even the ordinary telephone network in the USSR remained in a sorry state at least into late 1970s, if not longer -- many people did not have a phone, and switchboard operators were still connecting long-distance calls.
Unfortunately for them the Soviet Union was a bureaucracy and not much of a technocracy. If the technocrats had won then it might have gone differently
@@duckpotat9818 I am not sure if this is the reason for the failure of the USSR. At least formally, almost all of the top management in the USSR had engineering degrees. If you look at the orders issued by the central committee of the communist party, sometimes they concerned ridiculously minute technicalities -- like what kind of rivets to use in some rocket. Seriously.
Known in patent law (which our host should do an episode on, though I'm 100% sure he'll butcher it, as everybody does) as "constructive reduction to practice" (that is to say, a "paper invention") as opposed to an "actual reduction to practice" (actually building the paper invention, which is often easier said than done). For this reason I propose for patent reform separate patents for actual and for constructive reduction to practice, unless it's trivial to do both (which experts can determine). It's one thing to say you can shoot a satellite to the moon, as Jules Verne wrote about well before Goddard's rockets, and quite another to actually make this work (you need metallurgy that can withstand incredible forces, and yes, they're working on such a rail gun for launching things into NEO).
@@duckpotat9818 Even technocrats would probably end up preventing new things from being adopted. Imagine mandating a switch to a unified standard at the cost of $10 billion and then within 1 year of completion the standard becomes obsolete. Naturally as an government official you would be under so much pressure to not spend another $10 billion to upgrade right away.
@@cogoid They were right to concern themselves with such specifics, because without (and sometimes despite) such directives, whichever rivet sat in the closest drawer, was going in. USSR has given me a wonderful childhood (free from monetary concerns and violence and excess sexualisation or envy) - one I won't be able to buy my own kids for a million dollars. I love that country dearly. And yet, and yet, let me tell you this: space, military, sports, the arts, and sciences, hoovered up top 15% of all cadre. All of those fields are "icing on the cake" / "force multiplier" type - they fundamentally enhance the effect & reach of an otherwise healthy economy. The leftover folks who were left to actually make that economy work, were okay to mediocre. The same constraint exists in capitalism (read "Good to Great") except (1) there's an economic equilibrium among the fields, making talent distribution more organic and efficient, and (2) even more importantly, there's a far steeper economic gradient from carrot to stick vs. under socialism, and that made the middle 80% of society more productive. The top 10% of workers are driven by passion and self-actualization (Neil Armstrong landing on the Moon was a government employee paid not very much), and bottom 10% (of ANY society), using your example, will put the wrong rivet in half the time, and not install it properly - no matter how much you pay them. So these 20% of folks perform equally in socialism & capitalism. But that remaining middle 80% - capitalism makes them work their tails off, whereas under socialism they're coasting. And yes under capitalism they're often less happy, yes their kids grow up distant & often broken, yes capitalism's "grow or die" mantra isn't at equilibrium with the environment BUT in the 1960s through 1990s it was the economic engine that'd handily out-competed socialism. Naturally, with the socialist threat removed, the fat middle class was no longer needed, and hence it's being divested of as we speak.
My father worked for an US Army weapons lab. I remember, in my early teens, him telling me that he was able to access computers all over the country. He didn't talk much about work because it was, of course, classified. He did expose me to a lot of the electronics with manuals and parts that were commercial. It was only years later, when I was working on massively networked systems (I actually worked on the GE system you mentioned), that I recalled his comments.
That's how the internet started, it was a military network and since there was no commercial access specially outside the country, it worked well and secure to hacking. US should've maintained control of the internet, Obama's handover of the internet to a UN front organization was treasonous. That's why we can keep up with the cyber attacks, we could've easily punished the abusers by cutting them off the internet if we still had all the keys
One rudiment of this endeavor was the network of ЦНТИ (TsNTI) - Centers of Scientific Technical Information scattered across the USSR. As a university student in the 1990s I briefly worked in one of them. By the 1980s they were mainly equipped with IBM clones connected mostly through dialup, rarely with fiber-optic. They had by then lost their economic purpose and basically became imitational bodies, creating fake jobs for the director and "engineer" cronies. By late 1980 and early 1990s they mostly made money by renting out their premises to various computer and electronics shops. By mid 1990s most were gone, their buildings embezzled through various corrupt schemes. But they did in a way contribute to the internet adoption in Russia.
Soviet technology is quite interesting. In the USA, we were always working to create new types of electronics, while the soviets were still making the best out of vacuum tubes and germanium transistors. Today, many technicians are buying Soviet surplus parts to fix their vintage electronics.
@@clydeblair9622 Lots of modern high quality equipment serving music industry is using either old stocks or newly produced vacuum tubes. Russia is the only country in the world still capable of making high quality tubes, others can't produce them in sufficient numbers, quality.
@@clydeblair9622 Nuclear blackout is what? Certain industry can't do without high quality tubes Russia is making and nothing can replace them since old stocks are pretty much depleted. There are other manufacturers with inferior quality.
@@clydeblair9622 and so for that sole purpose they were so heavily produced and used for their technology? Was it just for that purpose, in preparation of nuclear war. Or is it just coincidental in regards to their intended purpose -- that being their limited and widely used technology?
Interestingly the Chileans did a similar computer controlled central economy during Allende presidency. That was the brainchild of a British computer engineer to run the Chilean copper mines in the 1970s.
I think you may be referring to Stafford Beer, who wrote at length on cybernetics. His work is extensive and impressive but rather hard to follow. His design for information flow helped the Allende government to deal with a national transport strike, until the government was ousted with the probable help of the CIA. The information model he developed has similarities with the National Intelligence Model used today by UK police. A video would be great, but to actually get to grips with Stafford Beer's work and thought would take a year or more of study.
Apparently that system helped improved the economy, in ways it was able to calculate and disperse and plan their way out of the oncoming inflation. I read in an article somewhere. But soon after, Allenade was brought down and the system was retired.
@@wyleong4326 That figures. The system is fairly general. Allende was brought down by Pinochet's military coup, with a background of American opposition to the Allende government.
Glushkov was truly a Victor Frankenstein of Soviet science. The elderly Party leadership wasn't interested in OGAS (which frankly was unrealistic) but was very interested in his ideas of transhumanism and reaching immortality through progress in biology and computing. That would be the nice topic to cover.
They were not interested in such things, except in some 80s Hollywood paranoid fantasy. This is more a topic of interest for the WEF overlords of today.
Very interesting how many times the idea came up. Was seen as very promising. The goverment realized it would intefer with their personal power and wealth. And then shut it down. An exccellent example of some of the root issues of the USSR
What else do you expect when the people have given absolute power to a single entity. Some people lack the basic understanding of how simple human emotions like greed work.
@@zoladkow y'know, maybe others don't share the sentiment, but I've gotten quite tired of the "humanity is this and that" perspective. Phrases like "I'm loosing faith in humanity" made sense to me, but the more I thought about it the less I agreed. Since pretty much all groups and societies often have wildly different social norms, social structures and cultures, its not very accurate or useful to attribute any trait to "humanity" outside of very basic statements. For your example, there's the obvious case of the US and their allies not having the same issue the Soviets had (at least when it comes to creating the internet). Aside from that, the thing that bothers me most is the possible implication of hopelessness, that humanity is cursed to have that trait. From what I've seen, such cynicism just isn't helpful - its not like there's a choice to not deal with our own faults. (kinda took a comment too seriously xd - but I wanted to formulate my thoughts on this)
TCP/IP and the RFCs that standardized its development were the real genius behind DARPANET/ARPANET. Much of this came from research at Stanford and UCB in the 60's. Packet switching led to the development of ethernet systems and the infrastructure we know today. It is fascinating stuff, if a little bit tech-y.
@@stevebabiak6997 It was both Donald Davies and Larry Roberts that came up with the idea of packet switching, independently of each other mind you since Davies was at the time working for the British National Physics Laboratory and Roberts was working on ARPANET. You might be confusing in with the ALOHANET, a packet switching network that used radio transceivers for communication between nodes which was developed in Hawaii.
As for sources as someone who has a masters in history I really appreciate the research you do and these are some of the better videos that deal with such complex topics and make these videos more watchable than most. Even the best historians are not perfect, we by custom always end our intros with “all errors are my own.” It’s important to be humble in the face of the past. Keep up the good work.
@sfarrell71138 it can be.... I read a book once on the Breganza family who ruled portugal for much of its history and the author flat out states that there were few Portuguese language sources prior to the 19th century and what we know had to be pieced together from french and english sources. Also the past can be unpredictable with new evidence being found, debated, etc. Also never forget that 99% of history isn't recorded and is lost to time... every moment of every day for every person is history and what we are left is very little.
Kinda ironic that the west apparently took his "computing power for individuals" idea and ran with it. Filtered through a capitalist lens but much much better than being purged
Ironically, OGAS failed because of inter-factional disputes, whereas ARPANET succeeded on account of clear leadership structures and cooperation in government to get it done. So, what we expect is the 'capitalist' behavior and what is the 'socialist' behavior that we expect kind of got switched around, the same is the case with the Soviet Moonshot.
Similar "paradoxical" issues appeared in the command structures of the Axis powers when compared to the Allies. The authoritarian dictatorships had militaries filled with confusing byzantine chains of command, with destructive rivalry being common among higher-ups, and cooperation with other branches was sketchy at best, and coordination with their allies even less so. Meanwhile the democratic, free thinking, individualistic Allied nations had very clear chains of command(at least relatively, communication issues happened of course), and they even decided who would be in over all command when forces from separate nations were operating in the same place togeather.
i think a lot of this has to do with the differing scope between the two projects owing to the different views of the role of government. in the US, the govt is considered to play an important role in encouraging basic research, hence the vast public university system as well as ARPA, but not in implementing the results of this research into things everyday people use. that's the point of commercialization. thus, ARPANET was conceived as a research project first and foremost. there were some military applications, but for the most part, the task was about seeing if you could network together some computers. what networked computers could be used for would eventually be left to private industry. with such a limited scope, it's much easier to undertake a science-first approach that does not need to jump over big political hurdles. they made ARPANET happen and published some important protocols and that was it. in contrast, the Soviet system requires the all-encompassing approach that was discussed in the video. there is no other reservoir of innovation to take the ball and run with it, there is only the central authority that has to build the whole thing. so you end up with people whose careers are threatened and other people who see the opportunity to shift the project to their own goals and other people who object to some aspect or another, etc. etc.
@@magicjuandSo basically decentralisation against centralisation. In a capitalist democratic society you let many entities carve out ideas and if some of them fail there's still a chance that one or two will be succesful. In an authoritarian system it's do or die for the central entity, so they either come up with the one genius idea or they mess it up completely. Almost no in between and the personal interest issues you mentioned are even added on top of that.
With capitalism, corporations that have internal issues aren't successful/last long enough to be on the frontiers of ground breaking technology. This is an issue with not just command economies, but top-down governments as well.
@@nilon5327 its even worse than that, if you're part of a particular clique in the Soviet bureaucracy, the fact that an amazing idea that benefits the country to a huge level happens to be an idea made by another clique, you have a very vested interest in making sure that idea never gets off the ground.
This reminds me a lot of “We”, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, in the way people hoped technology would allow for the creation of utopia. A great book for anyone interested in revolutionary russia or dystopian fiction in general, especially because it was published in 1924 and written by an actual Bolshevik. Also it’s almost certain that Orwell borrowed heavily from it to write 1984.
Apparently Yev regretted how much the Communists idolized it and wanted to replicate it. 1984 has nothing on some of the stuff in there like prescribed life partners and the open sex requests 😬 yeesh
OGAS would have quantified and tracked the means by which the Soviet leadership ran the Soviet economy. The materials they controlled were the very means of their power. To pass the tracking of those resources to computers would have taken away their power over those resources.
This totally got me thinking about the possibility of a nearby parallel reality where there's a cybernetic Soviet Union pushing ahead with their own 'Big Red' centralised network to counter the capitalist 'Big Blue'. Their "socialist-network" connects USSR, Soviet Bloc, China, Korea and Vietnam.
I really wish the USSR got their computing industry on-par with the West. I'm no commie, but it would've been exciting. And while at it, maybe have an equivalent (but not clone) to the IBM PC as well. Now we get 4 dominant home microcomputers around the world: IBM PC from the U.S., NEC PC-98 from Japan, BBC Micro from the U.K., and whatever computer the Soviets make... I wonder if somebody has written an alternate history book about that
@@pandakekok7319 There is an audio techno-opera about the Soviets creating an OGAS-style system called 2032: Легенда о несбывшемся грядущем ('2032: The Legend of the Unfulfilled Future'). Soviets had a clone for nearly every Western standard in the 1980s (IBM, IBM PC, Apple 2, PDP-11, ZX Spectrum, VAX and HP-2100). Unfortunately, yeah they were clones. A few years ago I watched the opinion of a guy who spent many years studying the topic, and he suggested that the alternative path the Soviets could have taken in computing could have been what we now think of as cloud-based - that is you would have a terminal at home and a series of very powerful computing centers you would connect to. The video is called "Альтернатива. О возможном пути развития ЭВМ в СССР" (there are no English subs but google translation might help get the gist).
Russia and China maintained very secretive intelligence sharing and communications cables networks even when China deceived Americans that they were the foe of the Soviet Union and a US ally. They were rivals but always considered the democratic USA as the biggest existential threat due to America's soft powers, such as the attractive idea of free society, vibrant and dominant pop culture, innovative economy and efficient productivity. What the CCP achieved had Americans hand over copies of their industrial and economic management, market system and technological and manufacturing knowhow while refusing to copy what made free enterprise model possible: classical liberalism. As a result as I predicted CCP china is going to move toward its communist roots where state once again owns and controls everything, that centralization is already happening and as a result tens of trillions in asset valuation is going to evaporate in China, starting with the ongoing real estate collapse that's going to ultimately make CCP everyone's landlord and therefore all real estate become public assets and worth no market value
@@pandakekok7319 I think that would've saved them. Instead of a bunch of corrupt bureaucrats running the industries, computer algorithms would've been running them with greater efficiency and like an American conglomerate corporation like GE, Boeing, Ford, Amazon,... would run vast industries and enterprises. It wouldn't have solved their innovation disadvantages but certainly helped their productivity and efficiency of manufacturing.
Not possible because of inherent problems caused by centrally-planned economy and other of their ideas such as full employment policy. Those were the reasons why they couldn't develop their technology on pair with the West, but even if they did, it would not have achieved what they wanted it to do.
Thank you Asianometry, you are one of the few English-language channels that do justice to the old Soviet Union without resorting to tankie apologetics.
OGAS sounds very much like Chile's Project Cybersyn, the Salvador Allende era system (some of it computerized) to manage the Chilean economy that actually demonstrated some success until the September 1973 coup that deposed him.
That was my immediate thought, too -- I did my MSc thesis on Stafford Beer's Viable System Model, which was the theoretical basis for the design of Cybersyn.
I'm a CS/philosophy student enamored by cybernetics. I'd love to see your take on Chile's Project Cybersyn, which I'm under the impression was developed farther than OGAS (at least, until Pinochet took over and destroyed it).
Cybersyn was never destroyed by Pinochet, simply because Cybersyn was never built in the allende government. To begin with, it was not even an electronic system, but the nodes communicated through telegraph-like machines. Secondly, those who proposed it had no idea what its purpose should be; some wanted it to direct industrial production, but the unionists were opposed to expropriated industries being managed by anyone other than themselves. Then, when the system could be put into "activity", it barely served to coordinate a few activities outside the capital of Santiago, activities which however had little relation to industrial production in Chile. Finally, Stafford Beer, the supposed "creator" of the Cybersyn project, acknowledges that he never created anything, but was simply a consultant hired by Allende, recognizing that at the end of the day the project was without any clear leadership or purpose. Cybersyn rather than representing an attempt by socialists to develop advanced technology (a belief that exists to this day), what it more accurately represents is the state bureaucracy of socialist government, and how it slows rather than helps technological advancement.
@@Skythikon There is a book called something like "la historia de la informatica en chile (1957 - 1999)" that included everything about cybernetics, computers, cybersyn, networks and cybercrime in Chile. It even talks about a failed attempt to manufacture cheap semiconductors in Chile (this was before there were even such factories in Asia), an episode that almost no modern historian has rescued. Unfortunately this is an old book from almost 25 years ago and apparently it is neither translated nor digitized anywhere, which is a pity because it is a very complete book but easy to read, and it includes very interesting information about old technologies in chile and also latinamerica. I am going to talk maybe someday with a publisher if it is possible that they can reprint it.
Never interfere with a man's fiefdom if you wish to keep your Party membership... Truly interesting video, I'd not known that this came "close" to happening in the USSR.
USSR was trying to copy preaty much everything that USA was doing so where is the surprise? That first N device tested in USSR that the video is mentioning was an exact copy of American device, the factory that produced was also an exact copy of American factory, when they got satelite photos of that Russian complex the inteligence officerse were shocked that even the shape and relative positions of building was exactly the same as in Los Alamos...
Cool video @asianometry! I read the book Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, and towards the end, he briefly mentioned that there were efforts to digitalise production throughout the USSR like that. It's cool to hear more about it
Oh yeah, this video gave big flashes back to Red Plenty. It's interesting that the video talks about completely different people who still bumped into the exact same systemic issues.
I love this video, and the explanation of how the Soviet unions Internet never really took off. Makes me think I would love to see a video by you, explaining how the Western Internet actually successfully came into being.
Short version. SAGE, Whirlwind, ARPA, and Bell Labs all received government funding for computer development and later let them be commercialized. Bell Labs released the transistor technology for licensing under pressure by the Justice Dept. SAGE companies like IBM and Honeywell developed mainframes. Computers were picked up mainly by the financial industries, such as banks for fail-safe computing and automation during the paper crisis of the early 1970s. The move to markets in the 1970s and 1980s helped computers and networking. Reuters Money Market Monitor created the first virtual market used for FX exchange after Bretton Woods was ended. SWIFT picked up ARPA's packet-switching, although TCP/IP required a military decree in the early 1980s. Those protocols were further diffused through the NSFNET, assisted by "Star Wars" money and fear of the Japanese 5th Gen to link up supercomputers for AI. Gore went on a global crusade for the GII at the GATT Uruguay Round and ITU plenipotentiary to privatize global telecoms. That was solidified at the first WTO meetings, along with the ending of tariffs on IT. Thus we got the WWW. It was a complex interplay of government funding, military rationale, and private-sector innovation.
As always, another educational opportunity not to be missed. It is interesting to note that AI seems to be the next opportunity on the road to digital hierarchies that is slowly following some of the same idiosyncrasies that the Soviets faced with mainframe computers and networking.
AIs won't solve the fundamental problem of power dynamics within human institutions, and the way the economy is structured. Even if it clearly tells us what we have to do, humans take the decisions in the end, or don't take them.
Well, no. AI is being researched and furthered by millions of individuals to benefit 100s of thousands of organisations. I for example am working on object detection for game cameras, to identify and upload only 'interesting' frames. The problem? 'Define Interesting' 😊
I've really been enjoying your channel and the content. Hope you are able to keep going and doing well! Have a wonderful day and thank you for being you! 🍻🌎❤️🌮
Opposition to OGAS from political bodies reminded me of Jack Ma getting into trouble after his radical financial algorithm proposition. However it may be argued the motivations from both sides were different in these seperate events, among other things.
The difference being that in Russia some actually believed in communism. The Chinese "communism" was always, at every level of design, doctrine and implementation, about creating an elite that had an excuse for living in luxury while telling the peasants that this is what social justice looks like.
@@andersjjensen I respectfully disagree. It was the same both ways; For some folks in China who really do believe it, and the Soviet system was also about implementing dogma and doctrine, for the benefit of the elite to live in luxury off the poor. No need to take sides on this one
@@MathewRenfro That's the endgame of all """revolutions""" g0yyim. The """Chosen Ones"""on top and the rest of people begging for crumbs, just as Lenin wrote.
What a fascinating story this is, and one I'd never heard of before. 👍 If a command economy could ever be made to work without a crushing bureaucracy and inefficiency, this is probably how it would need to be done.
If it can work, it will work eventually on its own. Some corporation, for example Microsoft, after astounding success of neural networks, will use them to expand and devour entirety of the economy, which will happen naturally since it is best at making decisions and wins in a long run. And then you have a single centralized entity guiding economy. Wouldn't even have to kill tens of millions of people, who knew. And if it doesn't work, then it won't happen.
@@abnerdoon4902 happens in the US, too. The difference is that people can get voted out, fired, or they just go out of business. It’s hard to be too corrupt for too long.
This is one of the very few channels where I click on the thumbs up before I have listened to the entire video. Informative and carefully researched, these are valuable history lessons.
2:25 Yep and this is the basic concept of Proudhon anarchism theory, which is the most conservative socialist ideology. Possession is differentiated from Property. An individual (or a family) possesses something until they have no use of it.
Personal property is the term he used that underlined in mutualism. Karl Marx actually agreed with alot of his works but criticize some details under mutualism. Fair enough. Lol
One key difference that presents itself from listen to this video is that in the Soviet union the main issue was control. OGAS was proposed as an overarching control mechanism and the objections to it were essentially that it was an overarching control mechanism that will compete with humans who wished to retain control. ARPANET was coming as I am standard, fundamentally about sharing information and not about control. My impression is that it was essentially created and constructive to see what could be done with it rather then furthering specific government policy objectives. After all I gather it was initially connecting universities not government entities right? The USA certainly has many critics, but the general psychology of American society and it's technology industries, is to develop ideas unimpeded by political ideology and then explore how they can be adapted to suit the needs and desires of society at large. If hypothetically we assume that there is some truth in that it is quite obvious why it never worked in the Soviet Union, where the national psychology and ideology is the near complete antithesis!
You are wrong, the keyword is not control. A proper allocation of resources is what this system was planned for. You can even say that some kind of logistics from raw materials to the end consumer.
@@Ταυρικήσιδηρίτις That's a true statement. However, the Soviet economy was predicated on centralized control of who makes what where and who gets to buy it, and the stated prices for doing so. So by using OGAS to calculate, plan, and dictate the economy of the Soviet Union, it is by its very nature acting as a controller. And since that rational, automated control would render large chunks of the Soviet bureaucracy without power or influence (especially when they can't adjust figures and statistics to favor their continued necessity to the state apparatus), it was going to have opposition from those who actually wanted to keep their place of power in the system, however small or specialized it was. Even in American corporations, especially those with a large enough presence that sheer inertia can keep them going for a while, you will find that innovations and potentially beneficial tech get suppressed or fail to be developed because they would render a previously essential class of worker/manager/specialist/executive/etc. out of a job or diminished importance, and will fight to stay in power, regardless of the overall benefit.
That was really interesting. I actually discovered Norbert Weiner's book on cybernetics in the school library back in the 80s. It was a fascinating and very inspiring book to read, and I'd say one of the best. The other big player of this era was John von Neumann.
In the USSR the military-industrial complex was the most advanced and well resourced branch of the economy, with certain degree of internal (managed) competition. It pretty much existed as a parallel quasi-state and logically quite cautious of sharing/cooperating any of its resources and privileges in a way that would diminish its position, as it existed in a rigid low-trust totalitarian state with immovable status-quo. Power brokering at different state administration levels, not much dissimilar of the lobbying culture in the US, was pretty much the only channel of implementing innovations and just moving things ahead, since there's was no free market competition with independent actors, governed by impartial legal and judicial systems. From outside such a society might project an image of rigid unity, but in reality it is simply a long game of precariously balanced standoff between different wolf packs where only a strong leader can keep the whole enterprise in some working order -- the top alpha power-broker.
"Power brokering at different state administration levels, not much dissimilar of the lobbying culture in the US, was pretty much the only channel of implementing innovations and just moving things ahead" nice comment.
It's somewhat ironic, that with the many mergers in the Russian military-industrial complex over the last 20 years, it's now more centralized, less inter-competitive and (with Politicians often sitting on the Boards of Directors), closer to Politics, than it was in in the USSR.
Bet more than a few elites breathed a sigh of relief when it became clear the party elites made some serious missteps when it came to this kind of technology. Had they built the system that was being proposed and adjusted the command economy to fit it, then most of us would have had very different experiences in our Econ 101 classes.
Tbh while I think this would have helped soviet planning work better, I don't think it really solves the fundamental problem which is that the soviet bureaucracy managing the economy was really under no incentive or pressure to get anything done. They could just block any potentialy "disruptive" proposals.
@@kylehankins5988 I agree. Which is why they would have had to adjust the command economy and the party bureaucracy to the system. Had they done that it's likely the USSR would have survived as a socialist state.
2:20 That's not what a "command economy" is. 2:25 Like a lot of people, you've confused "private property" with "personal property". 2:32 _That's_ what a command economy is.
People are often unwilling to look at the difference because they think private property is personal property. That or they don't want to validate any kind of leftist view points...
What’s the meaningful difference between private property and personal property? If jimmy wants to brush his teeth and I offer to sell him my tooth brush has my property suddenly transformed? If I, an enthusiast, offer to replace my neighbors car oil for money has my labor and equipment suddenly been transformed from personal property to private property? I’d argue that there’s no way meaningfully enforce the distinction without destroying the economy. And I’d argue that there is no real distinction unless you’re a communist who doesn’t want to say they want to steal other peoples property.
@@chinguunerdenebadrakh7022 The memes, of course, would be centrally designed by the central committee of the Department of Memetics and distributed to each citizen in accordance with their needs... At least in theory.
@@VestinVestinEastern Europe would have 10 years backward parity and the citizen would have to content with memes like "Socially Awkward Penguin" or "Philosoraptor" which prompts the KGB to stole memes stash from Pentagon.
Glushkov's ideas were rejected by Suslov and Kosygin in favor of the so-called Lieberman reforms -based on increasing the role of profit in economic calculations in planning. These reforms helped put the USSR into stagnation in the late 1970s, and Glushkov died a very bitter man. He said one of the reasons the party bosses rejected his ideas was because Lieberman's plan cost nothing but the paper it was printed on to implement, while Glushkov's plan cost billions of rubles and had an element of risk.
and nothing has changed in 70 years, and it won't in another 70.... sad. Russia could have been a proper powerhouse, and the envy of the world. Textbook example of how not to run a country.
the thought of even a portion of a massive nations industrial capacity directly controlable via one computer interface seems so strange and amazing. Like some video game production order.
I was today years old when... I realize just how weird the building interfaces are in civilization games v. How leaders would actually negotiate between local officials and resources they had to get something built.
Sounds like "The Forbin Project". Yes I remember the movie, it was pretty good. You haven't lived until you ran thicknet through a DARPA office and used a vampire tap.
wow, this is some great insight into what always seemed a bizarre shortcoming of Soviet industry.. Hearing about the bureaucratic infighting makes me want to learn more about the topic
The one thing that failed the Soviet internet. It's that bureaucracy exists for a reason. In the Soviet union, it was to protect the power of bureaucrats and military officers. Of course a decision maker wouldn't want their job being automated. That would lessen the opertunities for personal favours and drastically reduce their own personal power.
as a few others have pointed out, the ogas story didn't end in 1970 but started, and it was to launch in the year 2000. also worth mentioning is that a lot of managers were actually *too* enthusiastic re: automation, and one of glushkov's biggest supporters was ustinov -- it wasn't as simple as 'bureaucrats versus technocrats.'
Very, very interesting! I'm an economist, but just enough old to have studied the Soviet & European economies in the 1970-80's. Then when personal computers and later the internet came along, I was an early adopter, even listening in on what standards ought to be adopted. It's very interesting everytime you get an overview spanning longer time frames, because very, very few ideas are really fundamentally completely new. There is always an evolution of ideas. And advanced meta ideas of what "information" actually is, and how it can be utilized through things like networking, have obviously been there long before most of society even heard of "the internet". The strongpoint of the rather anarchist way of liberal market economy is, that a huge number of competing ideas get a chance. Yes, in theory, a lot of resources get wasted on a lot of bad ideas, compared to an ideal planned society. Sadly, in both systems a lot of good ideas also get wasted. Though without a doubt, I much prefer giving "mad" entreprenours, scientists and inventors the freedom to experiment without asking for endorsement. Yes, a lot of inventions never leave the garage, but some computer apples do!
I would like to commend the general comments about information gathering at the start of this video. I completely agree as to the importance of reading a wide range of opinion representing all potential biases.
The entire point of ARPANET was to get bombed (and survive), following the Sputnik scare (a.k.a. perceived unstoppable ICBM nukes raining down). The Soviets' "internet" was rather more pedestrian in its non-military objective, and hence had not much funding or gravitas.
@@AlexKarasev in many ways the Soviet plan is far closer to our Internet. Currencies, markets/bureaucracies, work, data banks all run on a centralised (ish, not many server providers) network of computers
I thought I was the only guy in the world remembering Gossplan... In fact I remember docummentaries from the late 70s? early 80s? Praising how Gossplan was the future for the world economy...
This was a fascinating insight into how the self-defeating "Soviet way of doing things" turned what could have been a 10-year head start on the biggest technological achievement of the 20th century into an just another Soviet embarrassment to add to the pile. It appears that ultimately no amount of technology can fix a fundamentally broken way of looking at the world.
The USSR had failures, yes, but you have to do research to understand the conditions they were in and realize that all the cards were stacked against them. They made incredible progress in spite of this, but to highlight failures as a "failure of the system" is nonsense . It's simply failures the Soviets have done, and yet, in spite of those failures and conditions, they still achieved rapid development and had gotten to where they were.
Then one day, the army realised that no home economy, meant no money for defence, no advanced in industry to source weapons and parts. Finally a poorer workforce meant poorer quality recruits
A reason wasn’t just corruption in the fear that individual power would be lost. It was that the state, as represented by the leaders and organizations, wanted to direct not just the economy, but the appearance of its success. In that undertaking, they needed to control the numbers. These systems would take that out of their hands, and spit out an objective accounting of how the economy was performing. But for the Soviet state, that would never do, and so these systems were doomed to failure.
On the other hand, DEMOS cooperative and RELCOM network not just survived but evolved into what we know today as Runet... Although it took shape right at the end of 1980s, connected with EUnet in 1990 (which is a cool story on its own) and in 1991 was the only information channel during the coup... It also was a purely institution -science network I'd love to see a video on this topic :D
Good video! One thing I think is important to mention is that there was/is a branch of socialists/communists/central planners who based their ideas around a command economy being achievable using computers back into the 1920s and 30s, so there was a little bit of ideological background to the idea I think.
Something even more crazy is: Soviet Union actually tried to create something similar to Internet making all the bureaucracy automatic (if i'm Correct) But it was denied so we never saw soviet Internet. (i think it was in 1950s or 1960s) Sorry if something here is not Correct, i don't really remember stuff because i have gold fish memory
2:25 The word you failed to find there is "personal" property. "Individual" is a categorically different description. "Just don't call it 'private'" makes it sound like you don't quite understand the distinction between property modes and hold them to be synonyms in your mind.
awesome writeup! i studied AiISU from 2000. the uni dropped the ball due to lack of lecturers, lol. did not graduate, went working in IT from year one.
The short answer is that the Soviets’ economic system just didn’t work. The lack of market incentives meant that their economy was bloated and inefficient, and had extreme difficulty generating technological advancements. While they could develop new technologies, it was difficult enough for them that the costs didn’t cover the benefits. So the only way they were able to grow was copying technologies that other countries had already developed, since they could literally get it for almost free via IP theft.
@rycka88 There was surely corruption and infiltration by CIA in the party, but it's not true that every leader after Stalin wanted to reinstall capitalism.
The Soviet system was constantly under siege by incredibly powerful forces. They had to divert enormous resources into the military since they had been invaded twice in 20 years and then suffered under constant sabotage, subversion propaganda, and economic sanctions from the Americans and Western Europe. They were never given a moment's peace to develop their economy without war or constant threat of war.
Duration of project grows exponentially with complexity. That's why is better to split one large project on many small ones and with distributed computer systems it worked nicely. In fact, many small organizations will create useful parts on own initiative, when possible.
Soviet economy in early years grew fast not due to effectiveness of command method but due to save labour and ripping off all resources to export them abroad in exchange for technologies and entire factories.
Well, the Soviets had to invest in Nuclear weapons and a powerful army. Had they not done that, they would have ended up like Saddam Hussein, Vietnam, Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Panama in 1989 and other Third World countries invaded and killed by the Americans...
I find it fascinating that the communist system and a command economy should have made it easier to build, and standardise What undermined this at every level was the soviet system which made it too easy to block it
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What an excellent video 👏😊
Imagine if the Soviets created the Internet back in the 1920s
ground news sounds good but they havent made any progress in about an year ive been using their app, its okay but sometimes it feeds facebook level of BS, ucranistan propaganda websites and so on
the military and space technology that USSR seemed to be successful in the beginning came a a result of "acquiring" the Nazi engineers that set the foundations in these fields, in particular for space. I can't suggest a good book about this as Russians keep their early history of rocket engineering still classified, however, I can recommend a channel of a Soviet rocket engineer who goes in depth about this topic on his channel, in Russian though.
@@john_in_phoenix ah yes good to see a fellow powerpoint enjoyer
The more video I watch on the soviet economy the more I realize that the main advantage the US economy had was their willingness to share game changing military technology with their civilian economy. Which created vast synergy and efficiencies and many positive feedback loop. Sharing really is caring and the US culture being able to share development with a wider swath of society really is the secret sauce that won them the cold war.
@Derek the idea of integrating the price signal as a "Sensory organ" of the command economy was on the table for the cyberneticists/economic planners, socialism with a market could still be socialism, its just that the soviets and US were at the extremes of that choice instead of a synthesis of those options.
@@MrWolfstar8 I fail to see how a price signal used by workers, in tandem with an autonomous resource distribution network maintained by workers, somehow cant be in line with socialism, economic controls operated by the workers. The soviet system, as you state with its beurocracies, is as far from worker control as the west was under capitalistic economies.
@@MrWolfstar8 all we needed was yet another definition of socialism. Thank you for that.
Basing an argument on an unorthodox definition does not make for a good argument. For an example of socialism that does not fit your initial definition, we need only look at China, as you mentioned yourself.
Yep. Fact is, politicians and bureaucrats are really no better than investors and corporate management. They are just as greedy and corruptible.
Giving them all the power in the state/society including the power to use coercion/violence (i.e. complete political, economic, and military power) is *bad idea.*
Decentralized (free) market system where consumer directly vote with their wallet is far superior compared to a command economy.
@@MrWolfstar8
Rules around electronic cars are nothing close to the Soviet command economy unless you are being deliberately obtuse.
Regulations are not a command economy, the US will not be dictating how or what cars will be made, and will not be assigning production numbers or materials to manufacturers.
In fact, the reason it won't lead to a collapse is exactly because the government is relatively hands off, only stepping in to ensure the regulations are met.
I was once directly involved in the "OGAS" project close to the end of the entire USSR. The part I was involved in, was called "АСУ Народное Образование" or "OGAS Education". The key problem that was discovered in my time there can be summarized as "garbage in - garbage out" problem. It was very clear that all the people involved in the management were trying to cheat on providing the data entry to achieve some advantage for themselves. One example of that was the total area of the floors and walls specified in the measurements of schools were far too much. Managers wanted to get more supplies, so they were tweaking the data a bit to get by. The same was happening at all levels, I'm afraid.
What would be the point of that? To embezzle building/supply money for themselves?
@@phanx0m924 There was a shortage of supplies. The point was to get more supplies to exchange the surplus for other supplies that were in deficit. Embezzlement was one of the points, but it wasn't the main point. There were people who had genuine care for their schools. They were trying to work the system. The root of the problem was in the centralized planning that was incapable of balancing the requirements with the means of production, I reckon.
WE had GI-GA problem in the 80s, it was resolved when Xerox told us of how they had structured their own emails, chat and basic computer modes. ergo now in each PC and lappy made there is one folder named XEROX now you can seewhy.
Id be thrilled to hear more.
@@echo88charlie Just watch the news. Everything is there now.
Soviets had excellent popular science books on computer-related subjects even in 1950s. But even though those books described in often fairly accurate details how people would use Internet in the future (dial up, search engines, electronic books, machine translation, etc), in reality, even the ordinary telephone network in the USSR remained in a sorry state at least into late 1970s, if not longer -- many people did not have a phone, and switchboard operators were still connecting long-distance calls.
Unfortunately for them the Soviet Union was a bureaucracy and not much of a technocracy.
If the technocrats had won then it might have gone differently
@@duckpotat9818 I am not sure if this is the reason for the failure of the USSR. At least formally, almost all of the top management in the USSR had engineering degrees. If you look at the orders issued by the central committee of the communist party, sometimes they concerned ridiculously minute technicalities -- like what kind of rivets to use in some rocket. Seriously.
Known in patent law (which our host should do an episode on, though I'm 100% sure he'll butcher it, as everybody does) as "constructive reduction to practice" (that is to say, a "paper invention") as opposed to an "actual reduction to practice" (actually building the paper invention, which is often easier said than done). For this reason I propose for patent reform separate patents for actual and for constructive reduction to practice, unless it's trivial to do both (which experts can determine). It's one thing to say you can shoot a satellite to the moon, as Jules Verne wrote about well before Goddard's rockets, and quite another to actually make this work (you need metallurgy that can withstand incredible forces, and yes, they're working on such a rail gun for launching things into NEO).
@@duckpotat9818 Even technocrats would probably end up preventing new things from being adopted. Imagine mandating a switch to a unified standard at the cost of $10 billion and then within 1 year of completion the standard becomes obsolete. Naturally as an government official you would be under so much pressure to not spend another $10 billion to upgrade right away.
@@cogoid They were right to concern themselves with such specifics, because without (and sometimes despite) such directives, whichever rivet sat in the closest drawer, was going in. USSR has given me a wonderful childhood (free from monetary concerns and violence and excess sexualisation or envy) - one I won't be able to buy my own kids for a million dollars. I love that country dearly. And yet, and yet, let me tell you this: space, military, sports, the arts, and sciences, hoovered up top 15% of all cadre. All of those fields are "icing on the cake" / "force multiplier" type - they fundamentally enhance the effect & reach of an otherwise healthy economy. The leftover folks who were left to actually make that economy work, were okay to mediocre.
The same constraint exists in capitalism (read "Good to Great") except (1) there's an economic equilibrium among the fields, making talent distribution more organic and efficient, and (2) even more importantly, there's a far steeper economic gradient from carrot to stick vs. under socialism, and that made the middle 80% of society more productive.
The top 10% of workers are driven by passion and self-actualization (Neil Armstrong landing on the Moon was a government employee paid not very much), and bottom 10% (of ANY society), using your example, will put the wrong rivet in half the time, and not install it properly - no matter how much you pay them. So these 20% of folks perform equally in socialism & capitalism. But that remaining middle 80% - capitalism makes them work their tails off, whereas under socialism they're coasting. And yes under capitalism they're often less happy, yes their kids grow up distant & often broken, yes capitalism's "grow or die" mantra isn't at equilibrium with the environment BUT in the 1960s through 1990s it was the economic engine that'd handily out-competed socialism. Naturally, with the socialist threat removed, the fat middle class was no longer needed, and hence it's being divested of as we speak.
My father worked for an US Army weapons lab. I remember, in my early teens, him telling me that he was able to access computers all over the country. He didn't talk much about work because it was, of course, classified. He did expose me to a lot of the electronics with manuals and parts that were commercial. It was only years later, when I was working on massively networked systems (I actually worked on the GE system you mentioned), that I recalled his comments.
you have cool lore
@@commenteroftruth9790 Thanks.
That's how the internet started, it was a military network and since there was no commercial access specially outside the country, it worked well and secure to hacking. US should've maintained control of the internet, Obama's handover of the internet to a UN front organization was treasonous. That's why we can keep up with the cyber attacks, we could've easily punished the abusers by cutting them off the internet if we still had all the keys
Cool asf man
Good for you, no one cares about your father
The dot comrade bubble.
I get it.
In Soviet Russia, Web Crawls You
Underrated comment.
Platinum
West negative: Boom and bust cycle.
East negative: Boom and MadMax cycle.
One rudiment of this endeavor was the network of ЦНТИ (TsNTI) - Centers of Scientific Technical Information scattered across the USSR. As a university student in the 1990s I briefly worked in one of them. By the 1980s they were mainly equipped with IBM clones connected mostly through dialup, rarely with fiber-optic. They had by then lost their economic purpose and basically became imitational bodies, creating fake jobs for the director and "engineer" cronies. By late 1980 and early 1990s they mostly made money by renting out their premises to various computer and electronics shops. By mid 1990s most were gone, their buildings embezzled through various corrupt schemes. But they did in a way contribute to the internet adoption in Russia.
Heya, where can i find primary source papers on soviet computations projects? Do you have like a public access database?
God damn even buildings getting embezzled over in the USSR. That's on another level.
@@JohnDobak No, that's capitalist Russia/Ukraine of the 90s. Embezzling of formerly USSR state assets was called "privatization".
"internet" is a local network with non routable IP numbers. Try again.
@@ilovecops5499 AkShUaLLy 🤓
Soviet technology is quite interesting. In the USA, we were always working to create new types of electronics, while the soviets were still making the best out of vacuum tubes and germanium transistors. Today, many technicians are buying Soviet surplus parts to fix their vintage electronics.
@@clydeblair9622 Lots of modern high quality equipment serving music industry is using either old stocks or newly produced vacuum tubes. Russia is the only country in the world still capable of making high quality tubes, others can't produce them in sufficient numbers, quality.
@@codaalive5076 Supposedly tubes are less susceptible to nuclear blackout.
@@clydeblair9622 Nuclear blackout is what? Certain industry can't do without high quality tubes Russia is making and nothing can replace them since old stocks are pretty much depleted. There are other manufacturers with inferior quality.
@@codaalive5076 Nuclear blackout - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_blackout
@@clydeblair9622 and so for that sole purpose they were so heavily produced and used for their technology? Was it just for that purpose, in preparation of nuclear war. Or is it just coincidental in regards to their intended purpose -- that being their limited and widely used technology?
It failed because it used cccp/ip instead of tcp/ip
In cccp/ip, client can't own static address.
It must be assigned by dhcccp server
repeating my other comment: In Soviet Russia, Internet routes YOU!
They did have very good Deep Proletariat Inspection technology though.
@@nicholasvinen I wish I was smart enough to understand these jokes
Groan!
@@armanbath that is unfortunate because it was a good one.
Interestingly the Chileans did a similar computer controlled central economy during Allende presidency. That was the brainchild of a British computer engineer to run the Chilean copper mines in the 1970s.
I think you may be referring to Stafford Beer, who wrote at length on cybernetics. His work is extensive and impressive but rather hard to follow. His design for information flow helped the Allende government to deal with a national transport strike, until the government was ousted with the probable help of the CIA. The information model he developed has similarities with the National Intelligence Model used today by UK police. A video would be great, but to actually get to grips with Stafford Beer's work and thought would take a year or more of study.
Apparently that system helped improved the economy, in ways it was able to calculate and disperse and plan their way out of the oncoming inflation. I read in an article somewhere. But soon after, Allenade was brought down and the system was retired.
@@wyleong4326 That figures. The system is fairly general. Allende was brought down by Pinochet's military coup, with a background of American opposition to the Allende government.
@@FriendsforFriendsUK And a Nazi church
IIRC, the system facilitated coordination and information exchange between state firms rather than a Soviet-style command economy.
Glushkov was truly a Victor Frankenstein of Soviet science. The elderly Party leadership wasn't interested in OGAS (which frankly was unrealistic) but was very interested in his ideas of transhumanism and reaching immortality through progress in biology and computing. That would be the nice topic to cover.
Of course that would interest them the most, seeing how old they all were. 😆👍
They were not interested in such things, except in some 80s Hollywood paranoid fantasy. This is more a topic of interest for the WEF overlords of today.
Actually, the first stage of OGAS named ASPR actually worked in late 80.
Imagine if USSR still existed, just how much technology we would have?
@MirroredVoid Nah. Even North Korea has smartphones, why wouldn't second most powerfull country have best tech?
Very interesting how many times the idea came up. Was seen as very promising. The goverment realized it would intefer with their personal power and wealth. And then shut it down. An exccellent example of some of the root issues of the USSR
root issues of humanity actually 🤷
What else do you expect when the people have given absolute power to a single entity.
Some people lack the basic understanding of how simple human emotions like greed work.
@@zoladkow y'know, maybe others don't share the sentiment, but I've gotten quite tired of the "humanity is this and that" perspective. Phrases like "I'm loosing faith in humanity" made sense to me, but the more I thought about it the less I agreed.
Since pretty much all groups and societies often have wildly different social norms, social structures and cultures, its not very accurate or useful to attribute any trait to "humanity" outside of very basic statements.
For your example, there's the obvious case of the US and their allies not having the same issue the Soviets had (at least when it comes to creating the internet).
Aside from that, the thing that bothers me most is the possible implication of hopelessness, that humanity is cursed to have that trait. From what I've seen, such cynicism just isn't helpful - its not like there's a choice to not deal with our own faults.
(kinda took a comment too seriously xd - but I wanted to formulate my thoughts on this)
(((berg)))
@@zoladkow Actually Socialism, arent the technological advancement happening in a capitalist society?
Try reading some more...
TCP/IP and the RFCs that standardized its development were the real genius behind DARPANET/ARPANET. Much of this came from research at Stanford and UCB in the 60's. Packet switching led to the development of ethernet systems and the infrastructure we know today. It is fascinating stuff, if a little bit tech-y.
Stop. I read enough RFCs for today.
IIRC, packet switching was from University of Hawaii.
@@stevebabiak6997 It was both Donald Davies and Larry Roberts that came up with the idea of packet switching, independently of each other mind you since Davies was at the time working for the British National Physics Laboratory and Roberts was working on ARPANET. You might be confusing in with the ALOHANET, a packet switching network that used radio transceivers for communication between nodes which was developed in Hawaii.
None of it would have worked without a good communications infrastructure says a retired communications technician.
I wonder if the Soviet networks used the same technologies or if they developed their own analogies to TCP/IP etc?
As for sources as someone who has a masters in history I really appreciate the research you do and these are some of the better videos that deal with such complex topics and make these videos more watchable than most. Even the best historians are not perfect, we by custom always end our intros with “all errors are my own.” It’s important to be humble in the face of the past. Keep up the good work.
@sfarrell71138 it can be.... I read a book once on the Breganza family who ruled portugal for much of its history and the author flat out states that there were few Portuguese language sources prior to the 19th century and what we know had to be pieced together from french and english sources. Also the past can be unpredictable with new evidence being found, debated, etc. Also never forget that 99% of history isn't recorded and is lost to time... every moment of every day for every person is history and what we are left is very little.
Ngl, Anatoly Kitov was really an exceptional character, signified by his hunger for wisdom and knowledge. Bro literally did maths in the battlefield.
Kinda ironic that the west apparently took his "computing power for individuals" idea and ran with it. Filtered through a capitalist lens but much much better than being purged
God I love this channel. You produce the EXACT conent I'm interested in, never missing. Keep it up
HE LITERALLY NEVER MISSES
1956: one single computer costing 8 billion dollars save our lives
2023: 8 billion computers showing cat videos vasting our lives
Ironically, OGAS failed because of inter-factional disputes, whereas ARPANET succeeded on account of clear leadership structures and cooperation in government to get it done.
So, what we expect is the 'capitalist' behavior and what is the 'socialist' behavior that we expect kind of got switched around, the same is the case with the Soviet Moonshot.
Similar "paradoxical" issues appeared in the command structures of the Axis powers when compared to the Allies.
The authoritarian dictatorships had militaries filled with confusing byzantine chains of command, with destructive rivalry being common among higher-ups, and cooperation with other branches was sketchy at best, and coordination with their allies even less so.
Meanwhile the democratic, free thinking, individualistic Allied nations had very clear chains of command(at least relatively, communication issues happened of course), and they even decided who would be in over all command when forces from separate nations were operating in the same place togeather.
i think a lot of this has to do with the differing scope between the two projects owing to the different views of the role of government.
in the US, the govt is considered to play an important role in encouraging basic research, hence the vast public university system as well as ARPA, but not in implementing the results of this research into things everyday people use. that's the point of commercialization.
thus, ARPANET was conceived as a research project first and foremost. there were some military applications, but for the most part, the task was about seeing if you could network together some computers. what networked computers could be used for would eventually be left to private industry.
with such a limited scope, it's much easier to undertake a science-first approach that does not need to jump over big political hurdles. they made ARPANET happen and published some important protocols and that was it.
in contrast, the Soviet system requires the all-encompassing approach that was discussed in the video. there is no other reservoir of innovation to take the ball and run with it, there is only the central authority that has to build the whole thing. so you end up with people whose careers are threatened and other people who see the opportunity to shift the project to their own goals and other people who object to some aspect or another, etc. etc.
@@magicjuandSo basically decentralisation against centralisation. In a capitalist democratic society you let many entities carve out ideas and if some of them fail there's still a chance that one or two will be succesful.
In an authoritarian system it's do or die for the central entity, so they either come up with the one genius idea or they mess it up completely. Almost no in between and the personal interest issues you mentioned are even added on top of that.
With capitalism, corporations that have internal issues aren't successful/last long enough to be on the frontiers of ground breaking technology.
This is an issue with not just command economies, but top-down governments as well.
@@nilon5327 its even worse than that, if you're part of a particular clique in the Soviet bureaucracy, the fact that an amazing idea that benefits the country to a huge level happens to be an idea made by another clique, you have a very vested interest in making sure that idea never gets off the ground.
This reminds me a lot of “We”, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, in the way people hoped technology would allow for the creation of utopia. A great book for anyone interested in revolutionary russia or dystopian fiction in general, especially because it was published in 1924 and written by an actual Bolshevik. Also it’s almost certain that Orwell borrowed heavily from it to write 1984.
Apparently Yev regretted how much the Communists idolized it and wanted to replicate it. 1984 has nothing on some of the stuff in there like prescribed life partners and the open sex requests 😬 yeesh
"We" is perfect world
@@missk1697heaven on earth….impossible
OGAS would have quantified and tracked the means by which the Soviet leadership ran the Soviet economy. The materials they controlled were the very means of their power. To pass the tracking of those resources to computers would have taken away their power over those resources.
Unfortunately a lot of the old Bolshevik ideals were phased out by that time.
This totally got me thinking about the possibility of a nearby parallel reality where there's a cybernetic Soviet Union pushing ahead with their own 'Big Red' centralised network to counter the capitalist 'Big Blue'. Their "socialist-network" connects USSR, Soviet Bloc, China, Korea and Vietnam.
I really wish the USSR got their computing industry on-par with the West. I'm no commie, but it would've been exciting. And while at it, maybe have an equivalent (but not clone) to the IBM PC as well. Now we get 4 dominant home microcomputers around the world: IBM PC from the U.S., NEC PC-98 from Japan, BBC Micro from the U.K., and whatever computer the Soviets make...
I wonder if somebody has written an alternate history book about that
@@pandakekok7319 There is an audio techno-opera about the Soviets creating an OGAS-style system called 2032: Легенда о несбывшемся грядущем ('2032: The Legend of the Unfulfilled Future'). Soviets had a clone for nearly every Western standard in the 1980s (IBM, IBM PC, Apple 2, PDP-11, ZX Spectrum, VAX and HP-2100). Unfortunately, yeah they were clones.
A few years ago I watched the opinion of a guy who spent many years studying the topic, and he suggested that the alternative path the Soviets could have taken in computing could have been what we now think of as cloud-based - that is you would have a terminal at home and a series of very powerful computing centers you would connect to. The video is called "Альтернатива. О возможном пути развития ЭВМ в СССР" (there are no English subs but google translation might help get the gist).
Russia and China maintained very secretive intelligence sharing and communications cables networks even when China deceived Americans that they were the foe of the Soviet Union and a US ally. They were rivals but always considered the democratic USA as the biggest existential threat due to America's soft powers, such as the attractive idea of free society, vibrant and dominant pop culture, innovative economy and efficient productivity. What the CCP achieved had Americans hand over copies of their industrial and economic management, market system and technological and manufacturing knowhow while refusing to copy what made free enterprise model possible: classical liberalism. As a result as I predicted CCP china is going to move toward its communist roots where state once again owns and controls everything, that centralization is already happening and as a result tens of trillions in asset valuation is going to evaporate in China, starting with the ongoing real estate collapse that's going to ultimately make CCP everyone's landlord and therefore all real estate become public assets and worth no market value
@@pandakekok7319 I think that would've saved them. Instead of a bunch of corrupt bureaucrats running the industries, computer algorithms would've been running them with greater efficiency and like an American conglomerate corporation like GE, Boeing, Ford, Amazon,... would run vast industries and enterprises. It wouldn't have solved their innovation disadvantages but certainly helped their productivity and efficiency of manufacturing.
Not possible because of inherent problems caused by centrally-planned economy and other of their ideas such as full employment policy. Those were the reasons why they couldn't develop their technology on pair with the West, but even if they did, it would not have achieved what they wanted it to do.
You never disappoint mate, keep up the good work! You're one of the few youtubers that always make me come back
Thank you Asianometry, you are one of the few English-language channels that do justice to the old Soviet Union without resorting to tankie apologetics.
He even tries to pronounce names with correct emphasis. Foreigners living in Slavic countries often don't do that
Yeah, to many socialist apologist who think the deaths didnt happen.
Damn it take my upvote! ❤️
How is it doing justice when every video on the subject is literally titled "Why the Soviet/East German [insert topic] Failed"?
@@ilyatsukanov8707 He should tell the truth and do a video about the resounding success of the Soviet internet, right comrade?
OGAS sounds very much like Chile's Project Cybersyn, the Salvador Allende era system (some of it computerized) to manage the Chilean economy that actually demonstrated some success until the September 1973 coup that deposed him.
That was my immediate thought, too -- I did my MSc thesis on Stafford Beer's Viable System Model, which was the theoretical basis for the design of Cybersyn.
Except Chile had no chance of actually affording Cybersyn, it was a massive failure before the heroic coup.
@@2hotflavored666 of course the pinnochet child molster protector apologists spouts this
@@2hotflavored666 Imagine defending a military dictator that disappeared thousands upon thousands.
@@bigyeet5857 Imagine defending a socialist dictatorship that did the exact same things the military dictatorship did but at least 10 times worse.
I'm a CS/philosophy student enamored by cybernetics. I'd love to see your take on Chile's Project Cybersyn, which I'm under the impression was developed farther than OGAS (at least, until Pinochet took over and destroyed it).
But cybersyn was made on a hurry IIRC
Cybersyn was never destroyed by Pinochet, simply because Cybersyn was never built in the allende government.
To begin with, it was not even an electronic system, but the nodes communicated through telegraph-like machines. Secondly, those who proposed it had no idea what its purpose should be; some wanted it to direct industrial production, but the unionists were opposed to expropriated industries being managed by anyone other than themselves. Then, when the system could be put into "activity", it barely served to coordinate a few activities outside the capital of Santiago, activities which however had little relation to industrial production in Chile.
Finally, Stafford Beer, the supposed "creator" of the Cybersyn project, acknowledges that he never created anything, but was simply a consultant hired by Allende, recognizing that at the end of the day the project was without any clear leadership or purpose.
Cybersyn rather than representing an attempt by socialists to develop advanced technology (a belief that exists to this day), what it more accurately represents is the state bureaucracy of socialist government, and how it slows rather than helps technological advancement.
@@DendrilopisXaggro Interesting. Any chance you have a favorite book on the subject, or something you'd point me towards if I wanted to learn more?
@@Skythikon There is a book called something like "la historia de la informatica en chile (1957 - 1999)" that included everything about cybernetics, computers, cybersyn, networks and cybercrime in Chile. It even talks about a failed attempt to manufacture cheap semiconductors in Chile (this was before there were even such factories in Asia), an episode that almost no modern historian has rescued. Unfortunately this is an old book from almost 25 years ago and apparently it is neither translated nor digitized anywhere, which is a pity because it is a very complete book but easy to read, and it includes very interesting information about old technologies in chile and also latinamerica. I am going to talk maybe someday with a publisher if it is possible that they can reprint it.
Never interfere with a man's fiefdom if you wish to keep your Party membership...
Truly interesting video, I'd not known that this came "close" to happening in the USSR.
USSR was trying to copy preaty much everything that USA was doing so where is the surprise?
That first N device tested in USSR that the video is mentioning was an exact copy of American device, the factory that produced was also an exact copy of American factory, when they got satelite photos of that Russian complex the inteligence officerse were shocked that even the shape and relative positions of building was exactly the same as in Los Alamos...
Have they now take the woman's out, who where holding the lines.
Cool video @asianometry! I read the book Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, and towards the end, he briefly mentioned that there were efforts to digitalise production throughout the USSR like that. It's cool to hear more about it
Oh yeah, this video gave big flashes back to Red Plenty. It's interesting that the video talks about completely different people who still bumped into the exact same systemic issues.
i'm glad that asianometry has good prowess for research
I love this video, and the explanation of how the Soviet unions Internet never really took off. Makes me think I would love to see a video by you, explaining how the Western Internet actually successfully came into being.
Why are you ruining his life? Why did the Soviet internet fail?
@@TimPerfetto lol
I'd be pleased to contribute my first hand recollections from 1980s-90s BBN, as well as introductions to other sources.
Short version. SAGE, Whirlwind, ARPA, and Bell Labs all received government funding for computer development and later let them be commercialized. Bell Labs released the transistor technology for licensing under pressure by the Justice Dept. SAGE companies like IBM and Honeywell developed mainframes. Computers were picked up mainly by the financial industries, such as banks for fail-safe computing and automation during the paper crisis of the early 1970s. The move to markets in the 1970s and 1980s helped computers and networking. Reuters Money Market Monitor created the first virtual market used for FX exchange after Bretton Woods was ended. SWIFT picked up ARPA's packet-switching, although TCP/IP required a military decree in the early 1980s. Those protocols were further diffused through the NSFNET, assisted by "Star Wars" money and fear of the Japanese 5th Gen to link up supercomputers for AI. Gore went on a global crusade for the GII at the GATT Uruguay Round and ITU plenipotentiary to privatize global telecoms. That was solidified at the first WTO meetings, along with the ending of tariffs on IT. Thus we got the WWW. It was a complex interplay of government funding, military rationale, and private-sector innovation.
Language makes a difference
Could you do a video about High Frequency Trading and all tech involved in that? Optiver is one of the bigger companies in the field.
nice topic
Great suggestion
No.
Currently taking my PhD in cybernetics, but I did not know the role Sovjet cybernetics played in this story. Interesting and informative video
Please say more😀
As always, another educational opportunity not to be missed. It is interesting to note that AI seems to be the next opportunity on the road to digital hierarchies that is slowly following some of the same idiosyncrasies that the Soviets faced with mainframe computers and networking.
AIs won't solve the fundamental problem of power dynamics within human institutions, and the way the economy is structured. Even if it clearly tells us what we have to do, humans take the decisions in the end, or don't take them.
@@annilator3000 excellent insight.
Well, no. AI is being researched and furthered by millions of individuals to benefit 100s of thousands of organisations. I for example am working on object detection for game cameras, to identify and upload only 'interesting' frames. The problem? 'Define Interesting' 😊
I've really been enjoying your channel and the content. Hope you are able to keep going and doing well! Have a wonderful day and thank you for being you! 🍻🌎❤️🌮
Opposition to OGAS from political bodies reminded me of Jack Ma getting into trouble after his radical financial algorithm proposition. However it may be argued the motivations from both sides were different in these seperate events, among other things.
"Imagine if the Soviets had had modern computing tech, they could have achieved their Communist Utopia..."
*China has entered the Chat*
"Oh."
💀
They would have managed themselves to get scarcity of qbits.
The difference being that in Russia some actually believed in communism. The Chinese "communism" was always, at every level of design, doctrine and implementation, about creating an elite that had an excuse for living in luxury while telling the peasants that this is what social justice looks like.
@@andersjjensen I respectfully disagree.
It was the same both ways;
For some folks in China who really do believe it, and the Soviet system was also about implementing dogma and doctrine, for the benefit of the elite to live in luxury off the poor.
No need to take sides on this one
@@MathewRenfro That's the endgame of all """revolutions""" g0yyim. The """Chosen Ones"""on top and the rest of people begging for crumbs, just as Lenin wrote.
Thank you for yet another carefully researched and thoughtful documentary. You seem to have found your niche in life.
Thanks!
the more you look at it... corruption / inefficiency & protectionism were the downfalls of the USSR rather than ideology or communism itself.
What a fascinating story this is, and one I'd never heard of before. 👍 If a command economy could ever be made to work without a crushing bureaucracy and inefficiency, this is probably how it would need to be done.
The crushing bureaucracy and inefficiency are features and not bugs.
Politics, corruption and petty interests always gets in the way.
This is why it'll never work.
There is a great 7 part series from Adam Curtis called Traumazone the second part goes into detail about gosplan
If it can work, it will work eventually on its own. Some corporation, for example Microsoft, after astounding success of neural networks, will use them to expand and devour entirety of the economy, which will happen naturally since it is best at making decisions and wins in a long run. And then you have a single centralized entity guiding economy. Wouldn't even have to kill tens of millions of people, who knew. And if it doesn't work, then it won't happen.
@@abnerdoon4902 happens in the US, too. The difference is that people can get voted out, fired, or they just go out of business. It’s hard to be too corrupt for too long.
This is one of the very few channels where I click on the thumbs up before I have listened to the entire video. Informative and carefully researched, these are valuable history lessons.
2:25 Yep and this is the basic concept of Proudhon anarchism theory, which is the most conservative socialist ideology. Possession is differentiated from Property. An individual (or a family) possesses something until they have no use of it.
Personal property is the term he used that underlined in mutualism. Karl Marx actually agreed with alot of his works but criticize some details under mutualism. Fair enough. Lol
But seriously, if only Kitov had proposed leveraging existing telex networks instead of depending on the military.
What telex networks? Apparently they were still using manual switchboards even in the 1970s.
Have you read about cybersyn? It was a Chilean project that was similar. Could be a cool video topic.
One key difference that presents itself from listen to this video is that in the Soviet union the main issue was control. OGAS was proposed as an overarching control mechanism and the objections to it were essentially that it was an overarching control mechanism that will compete with humans who wished to retain control.
ARPANET was coming as I am standard, fundamentally about sharing information and not about control. My impression is that it was essentially created and constructive to see what could be done with it rather then furthering specific government policy objectives. After all I gather it was initially connecting universities not government entities right?
The USA certainly has many critics, but the general psychology of American society and it's technology industries, is to develop ideas unimpeded by political ideology and then explore how they can be adapted to suit the needs and desires of society at large.
If hypothetically we assume that there is some truth in that it is quite obvious why it never worked in the Soviet Union, where the national psychology and ideology is the near complete antithesis!
You are wrong, the keyword is not control. A proper allocation of resources is what this system was planned for. You can even say that some kind of logistics from raw materials to the end consumer.
@@Ταυρικήσιδηρίτις That's a true statement. However, the Soviet economy was predicated on centralized control of who makes what where and who gets to buy it, and the stated prices for doing so. So by using OGAS to calculate, plan, and dictate the economy of the Soviet Union, it is by its very nature acting as a controller. And since that rational, automated control would render large chunks of the Soviet bureaucracy without power or influence (especially when they can't adjust figures and statistics to favor their continued necessity to the state apparatus), it was going to have opposition from those who actually wanted to keep their place of power in the system, however small or specialized it was. Even in American corporations, especially those with a large enough presence that sheer inertia can keep them going for a while, you will find that innovations and potentially beneficial tech get suppressed or fail to be developed because they would render a previously essential class of worker/manager/specialist/executive/etc. out of a job or diminished importance, and will fight to stay in power, regardless of the overall benefit.
That was really interesting. I actually discovered Norbert Weiner's book on cybernetics in the school library back in the 80s. It was a fascinating and very inspiring book to read, and I'd say one of the best. The other big player of this era was John von Neumann.
Every computer in the world for many generations has used the von Neumann architecture ☝️ Norbert was nothing by comparison
@@kxkxkxkx John von Neumann is also credited for the idea of a universally programmable machine.
Do a story on the economy of the Kuril Islands
I vote for North sentinel Island.
I have another idea: A story on the Aral Sea.
@@rutvikrs ofc you'd say that.
@Cu6upckuû This is offensive im from the kuril islands.
jk no one lives there
Why?
In the USSR the military-industrial complex was the most advanced and well resourced branch of the economy, with certain degree of internal (managed) competition. It pretty much existed as a parallel quasi-state and logically quite cautious of sharing/cooperating any of its resources and privileges in a way that would diminish its position, as it existed in a rigid low-trust totalitarian state with immovable status-quo. Power brokering at different state administration levels, not much dissimilar of the lobbying culture in the US, was pretty much the only channel of implementing innovations and just moving things ahead, since there's was no free market competition with independent actors, governed by impartial legal and judicial systems. From outside such a society might project an image of rigid unity, but in reality it is simply a long game of precariously balanced standoff between different wolf packs where only a strong leader can keep the whole enterprise in some working order -- the top alpha power-broker.
"Power brokering at different state administration levels, not much dissimilar of the lobbying culture in the US, was pretty much the only channel of implementing innovations and just moving things ahead" nice comment.
It's somewhat ironic, that with the many mergers in the
Russian military-industrial complex over the last 20 years,
it's now more centralized, less inter-competitive and
(with Politicians often sitting on the Boards of Directors), closer to
Politics, than it was in in the USSR.
Back in the days when you were able to not look like a weirdo wearing a lab coat for IT work
Bet more than a few elites breathed a sigh of relief when it became clear the party elites made some serious missteps when it came to this kind of technology. Had they built the system that was being proposed and adjusted the command economy to fit it, then most of us would have had very different experiences in our Econ 101 classes.
Tbh while I think this would have helped soviet planning work better, I don't think it really solves the fundamental problem which is that the soviet bureaucracy managing the economy was really under no incentive or pressure to get anything done. They could just block any potentialy "disruptive" proposals.
@@kylehankins5988 I agree. Which is why they would have had to adjust the command economy and the party bureaucracy to the system. Had they done that it's likely the USSR would have survived as a socialist state.
2:20 That's not what a "command economy" is.
2:25 Like a lot of people, you've confused "private property" with "personal property".
2:32 _That's_ what a command economy is.
People are often unwilling to look at the difference because they think private property is personal property. That or they don't want to validate any kind of leftist view points...
Let me guess, real communism has never been tried?
What’s the meaningful difference between private property and personal property?
If jimmy wants to brush his teeth and I offer to sell him my tooth brush has my property suddenly transformed? If I, an enthusiast, offer to replace my neighbors car oil for money has my labor and equipment suddenly been transformed from personal property to private property? I’d argue that there’s no way meaningfully enforce the distinction without destroying the economy. And I’d argue that there is no real distinction unless you’re a communist who doesn’t want to say they want to steal other peoples property.
@@TheWizardGamez Private property, in this context, refers to capital and the means of production.
Would've been interesting to see how it would've developed differently from the Western internet if it went mainstream in Eastern Europe...
Imagine the memes!
@@chinguunerdenebadrakh7022 The memes, of course, would be centrally designed by the central committee of the Department of Memetics and distributed to each citizen in accordance with their needs... At least in theory.
@@VestinVestinEastern Europe would have 10 years backward parity and the citizen would have to content with memes like "Socially Awkward Penguin" or "Philosoraptor" which prompts the KGB to stole memes stash from Pentagon.
Glushkov's ideas were rejected by Suslov and Kosygin in favor of the so-called Lieberman reforms -based on increasing the role of profit in economic calculations in planning. These reforms helped put the USSR into stagnation in the late 1970s, and Glushkov died a very bitter man. He said one of the reasons the party bosses rejected his ideas was because Lieberman's plan cost nothing but the paper it was printed on to implement, while Glushkov's plan cost billions of rubles and had an element of risk.
I believe the reforms were mostly nixed in the early 70s, due to a backlash from the old guard.
I've been looking forward to a video that more closely talks about Soviet cybernetics ever since you mentioned them in your previous video!
They used to hit flies in outter space, now they can't even see the cardboard planes flying at a few hundred feet.
These videos should have at least 500k views. Very informative!
Great work, never heard of this before.
What buildings (presumably, Soviet high-rises) are we looking at at 5:20 ?
Moscow State University. It has many buildings. Here is just one of them.
In USSR there was a lot of infighting and it was very authoritarian . That why we speak of USSR in past tense .
and nothing has changed in 70 years, and it won't in another 70.... sad. Russia could have been a proper powerhouse, and the envy of the world. Textbook example of how not to run a country.
In 60s the Soviet economy was far from stagnation, which started in 70s. Thank you for another great video
Before Khrushchev's revisionism kicked into full effect
the thought of even a portion of a massive nations industrial capacity directly controlable via one computer interface seems so strange and amazing. Like some video game production order.
I was today years old when... I realize just how weird the building interfaces are in civilization games v. How leaders would actually negotiate between local officials and resources they had to get something built.
One of the best topics I've seen so far here...
Sounds like "The Forbin Project". Yes I remember the movie, it was pretty good. You haven't lived until you ran thicknet through a DARPA office and used a vampire tap.
Saw the movie (have the DVD), and used the wire way back when.
wow, this is some great insight into what always seemed a bizarre shortcoming of Soviet industry.. Hearing about the bureaucratic infighting makes me want to learn more about the topic
Ironic that socialism failed because they didn't want to share.
There was a lot of hidden competition in departments and regions and a lot of weird microeconomies.
@@samsonsoturian6013Can you give me some examples and insight into this? Would be great.
This is so fascinating! I love nerding out your videos. Excellent work 💯
The one thing that failed the Soviet internet. It's that bureaucracy exists for a reason. In the Soviet union, it was to protect the power of bureaucrats and military officers. Of course a decision maker wouldn't want their job being automated. That would lessen the opertunities for personal favours and drastically reduce their own personal power.
as a few others have pointed out, the ogas story didn't end in 1970 but started, and it was to launch in the year 2000. also worth mentioning is that a lot of managers were actually *too* enthusiastic re: automation, and one of glushkov's biggest supporters was ustinov -- it wasn't as simple as 'bureaucrats versus technocrats.'
Very, very interesting! I'm an economist, but just enough old to have studied the Soviet & European economies in the 1970-80's. Then when personal computers and later the internet came along, I was an early adopter, even listening in on what standards ought to be adopted.
It's very interesting everytime you get an overview spanning longer time frames, because very, very few ideas are really fundamentally completely new. There is always an evolution of ideas. And advanced meta ideas of what "information" actually is, and how it can be utilized through things like networking, have obviously been there long before most of society even heard of "the internet".
The strongpoint of the rather anarchist way of liberal market economy is, that a huge number of competing ideas get a chance. Yes, in theory, a lot of resources get wasted on a lot of bad ideas, compared to an ideal planned society.
Sadly, in both systems a lot of good ideas also get wasted. Though without a doubt, I much prefer giving "mad" entreprenours, scientists and inventors the freedom to experiment without asking for endorsement. Yes, a lot of inventions never leave the garage, but some computer apples do!
I would like to commend the general comments about information gathering at the start of this video. I completely agree as to the importance of reading a wide range of opinion representing all potential biases.
ARPANET was much less ambitious, and the architecture was mostly designed to survive being bombed.
The entire point of ARPANET was to get bombed (and survive), following the Sputnik scare (a.k.a. perceived unstoppable ICBM nukes raining down). The Soviets' "internet" was rather more pedestrian in its non-military objective, and hence had not much funding or gravitas.
@@AlexKarasev in many ways the Soviet plan is far closer to our Internet.
Currencies, markets/bureaucracies, work, data banks all run on a centralised (ish, not many server providers) network of computers
@@duckpotat9818 True, they do now, but it would've been a bridge too far, even for the US, to implement Soviet style internet from the get-go.
Thank you for making another excellent video 👍
I thought I was the only guy in the world remembering Gossplan... In fact I remember docummentaries from the late 70s? early 80s? Praising how Gossplan was the future for the world economy...
"Why didn't the soviet internet take off?"... They didn't have cute cat videos?
This was a fascinating insight into how the self-defeating "Soviet way of doing things" turned what could have been a 10-year head start on the biggest technological achievement of the 20th century into an just another Soviet embarrassment to add to the pile.
It appears that ultimately no amount of technology can fix a fundamentally broken way of looking at the world.
The USSR had failures, yes, but you have to do research to understand the conditions they were in and realize that all the cards were stacked against them. They made incredible progress in spite of this, but to highlight failures as a "failure of the system" is nonsense . It's simply failures the Soviets have done, and yet, in spite of those failures and conditions, they still achieved rapid development and had gotten to where they were.
Hey @ 3:13 the nurse on the far left is Sam Bankman Fried ( SBF) time traveler !
Then one day, the army realised that no home economy, meant no money for defence, no advanced in industry to source weapons and parts. Finally a poorer workforce meant poorer quality recruits
Your channel is blasting 🚀
A reason wasn’t just corruption in the fear that individual power would be lost. It was that the state, as represented by the leaders and organizations, wanted to direct not just the economy, but the appearance of its success. In that undertaking, they needed to control the numbers. These systems would take that out of their hands, and spit out an objective accounting of how the economy was performing. But for the Soviet state, that would never do, and so these systems were doomed to failure.
On the other hand, DEMOS cooperative and RELCOM network not just survived but evolved into what we know today as Runet...
Although it took shape right at the end of 1980s, connected with EUnet in 1990 (which is a cool story on its own) and in 1991 was the only information channel during the coup... It also was a purely institution -science network
I'd love to see a video on this topic :D
Good video! One thing I think is important to mention is that there was/is a branch of socialists/communists/central planners who based their ideas around a command economy being achievable using computers back into the 1920s and 30s, so there was a little bit of ideological background to the idea I think.
remember any names?
@@JohnDoe-ph6if only really Cläre Tisch and Oskar R. Lange
from the socialist calculation debate
Something even more crazy is: Soviet Union actually tried to create something similar to Internet making all the bureaucracy automatic (if i'm Correct) But it was denied so we never saw soviet Internet. (i think it was in 1950s or 1960s) Sorry if something here is not Correct, i don't really remember stuff because i have gold fish memory
Great Video. Chalk one more to Network Effects.
But the russians (along with the chinese) are at it again, via standards bodies
In 1988 a Soviet visitor told me they had cloned VAX mainframe hardware but their version had bugs in it.
They did! Look up DEMOS and SM-1700 (also spelled CM-1700).
2:25 The word you failed to find there is "personal" property. "Individual" is a categorically different description.
"Just don't call it 'private'" makes it sound like you don't quite understand the distinction between property modes and hold them to be synonyms in your mind.
Wow this is the first tiem I've seen this subject on youtube GREAT CONTENT!!!!
awesome writeup!
i studied AiISU from 2000. the uni dropped the ball due to lack of lecturers, lol.
did not graduate, went working in IT from year one.
0:50 So what are your sources apart from this book?
The Soviet internet... fascinating. I had no idea..... thank you kindly.
Video starts 2:20....
Imagine how more powerful the sovjet union would,ve been had their internet not failed.
The short answer is that the Soviets’ economic system just didn’t work. The lack of market incentives meant that their economy was bloated and inefficient, and had extreme difficulty generating technological advancements. While they could develop new technologies, it was difficult enough for them that the costs didn’t cover the benefits. So the only way they were able to grow was copying technologies that other countries had already developed, since they could literally get it for almost free via IP theft.
@rycka88 There was surely corruption and infiltration by CIA in the party, but it's not true that every leader after Stalin wanted to reinstall capitalism.
The Soviet system was constantly under siege by incredibly powerful forces. They had to divert enormous resources into the military since they had been invaded twice in 20 years and then suffered under constant sabotage, subversion propaganda, and economic sanctions from the Americans and Western Europe. They were never given a moment's peace to develop their economy without war or constant threat of war.
Duration of project grows exponentially with complexity. That's why is better to split one large project on many small ones and with distributed computer systems it worked nicely. In fact, many small organizations will create useful parts on own initiative, when possible.
I like how unbiased this channel is, it just gives you the whole story without trying to prove a point. Other UA-cam channels should take notes.
Another great video, Jon! Thank you
4:01 - Let's just say, Uncle Joe's condition was not triggered by natural causes ;)
Soviet economy in early years grew fast not due to effectiveness of command method but due to save labour and ripping off all resources to export them abroad in exchange for technologies and entire factories.
The USSR should have invested in cybernetics and computers instead of space flight, nukes and other nonsense.
Well, the Soviets had to invest in Nuclear weapons and a powerful army. Had they not done that, they would have ended up like Saddam Hussein, Vietnam, Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Panama in 1989 and other Third World countries invaded and killed by the Americans...
hmm, so this is basically AWS communist edition. the funny this is AWS Azure and GCP became their own centrelised "communist" data center
Imagine the pressure of being the central planner in Moscow trying to decide what to command OGAS to do.
I find it fascinating that the communist system and a command economy should have made it easier to build, and standardise
What undermined this at every level was the soviet system which made it too easy to block it